The Part About the Crimes
This is a guide to 'The Part About the Crimes'. pg 432 sometime Florita Almada thought the author must have been a friend of Benito Juarez Benito Juarez, the 26th president of Mexico, is also cited in Part V by Archimboldi; From pg 808-809: "To be called Benno, in the first place, is suspicious." "Why?" Archimboldi wanted to know. ... "Why, because of Benito Mussolini, man! Where's your head?" ... "They called me Benno after Benito Juarez," said Archimboldi, "I suppose you know who Benito Juarez was." What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. Natasha Wimmer: "Here and over the next few pages, Florita quotes from (or paraphrases) Leopardi's 'Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia.' The version cited in the English edition of 2666 is by Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This turn of events might not have displeased Bolaño, whose affection for his Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde of Anagrama, clearly informs his portrayal of Archimboldi's publisher, Mr. Bubis." pg 436 It's Santa Teresa! It's Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. Natasha Wimmer: "Santa Teresa is a barely disguised version of Ciudad Juarez, transplanted from the state of Chihuahua to Sonora. In his depiction of the killings of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño relies heavily on a book by reporter and writer Sergio Gonzales Rodriguez of the Mexico City daily Reforma, who later became a friend. Titled Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert), the book includes a log-style accounting of the hundreds of women killed in Ciudad Juarez ('...23/09/02, Erika Perez, 25-30 years old, brown hair... 28/08/02, Dora Alicia Martinez Mendoza, 34 years old, 35 stab wounds...'). The book also records the commentary of Robert K. Ressler, American serial killer expert and adviser on the Jonathan Demme film The Silence of the Lambs, and paints a portrait of a very tall Egyptian man with a U.S. record of rape and assault, Abdul Latif Sharif, who was fingered as the serial killer. The two men are clearly models for 2666's Albert Kessler and Klaus Hass. Despite the novel's meticulous depiction of victims and killers and Bolaño's familiar obsession with geographical detail (especially topography and street names), Santa Teresa is above all a city of the imagination, the evocation of a state of mind. In one of his last interviews (with Monica Maristain for Playboy), Bolaño is asked what hell is like, and he says: 'Like Ciudad Juarez, which is our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustrations and of our vile interpretation of freedom and our desires.'" pg. 474 Blonde and very tall. Owner or possibly trusted employee at a computer store. Downtown. It didn't take Epifanio long to find the place. The man's name was Klaus Haas. This is probably the same computer place visited by Oscar Fate, the one with the name that translates as Fire, Walk With Me. Another site of evil for Bolaño. pg. 531 In the bathroom, curled up in the shower, her hands tied behind her back, Estefania's body.... He went in and kneeled down next to Estefania's body and examined it carefully, until he lost all sense of time. Natasha Wimmer: "The return to the scene of the crime is a moment of longstanding fascination for Bolaño. In the poem 'The Detectives' from the collection The Romantic Dogs, Bolaño describes it this way: "'I dreamt of a difficult case, / I saw corridors filled with cops, / I saw interrogations left unresolved, / The ignominious archives, / And then I saw the detective / Return to the scene of the crime / Tranquil and alone / As in the worst nightmares, / I saw him sit on the floor and smoke / In a bedroom caked with blood / While the hands of the clock / Traveled feebly through the / Infinite night.' In the Playboy ''interview, Bolaño remarks: 'I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer. That's one thing I'm absolutely sure of. A homicide cop, someone able to return alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts.' "And more cryptically, from the long, untranslated poem 'Un paseo por la literatura': '47. I dreamed that Baudelaire was making love with a ghost in a room where a crime had been committed. But Baudelaire didn't care. It's always the same, he said.'" '''pg. 539' Klaus Haas? asked Sergio. At the other end of the line he heard a laugh and then a kind of metallic wind, the sound of the desert and of prisons at night. Natasha Wimmer: "As is well known, Bolaño was marked by his short stay in prison during the Pinochet coup in Chile. The Santa Teresa prison acquires an almost anthropomorphic presence in 2666 ('It looks like something alive... Don't be shocked by what I'm about to say, but it looks like a woman who's been hacked to pieces. Who's been hacked to pieces but is still alive. And the prisoners are living inside this woman'). One of the characters in the novel makes reference to Piranesi and his imaginary prisons, which he sees 'extrapolated not exactly in Mexican prisons but in the imaginary and iconographic versions of some Mexican prisons.'" pg. 558 In 1976, the young Maria Exposito met two students from Mexico City in the desert... Three months later, when her great-grandmother asked her about the father of the child she was expecting, the young Maria Exposito had a strange vision. Natasha Wimmer: "This is the closest the reader comes to a sighting of Arturo Belano in 2666. But in El Secreto del Mal (2007), a posthumous collection of mostly unfinished short stories and essays edited by Ignacio Echevarria, Belano makes two (presumably) final appearances. In 'Death of Ulises,' he is a successful writer, forty-six, who returns to Mexico City, ditching a conference on Latin American literature to visit the apartment where Ulises Lima lived before he was struck and killed by a black Impala. Ulises is long gone, but Belano has an encounter with Ulises's last disciples and with the Mexico City of his own memory. 'The morning is a graveyard morning. The sky is dirt yellow. The clouds, which move slowly from south to north, are like lost cemeteries that sometimes break apart, so he can see fragments of gray sky, and sometimes come together with a screech of dry earth that no one, not even he, can hear, and that makes his head ache, as it did when he was a teenager and lived in Colonia Lindavista or in Colonia Guadalupe-Tepeyac.' When a taxi driver asks him whether he's Mexican, Belano answers, 'More or less.' The second story is only a page and a half long, clearly unfinished, and in the last paragraph, Bolaño writes: 'Arturo Belano was over fifty and sometimes he thought it was incredible that he was still alive.'" pg. 624 I'm sick of Mexicans who talk and act as if this is all Pedro Paramo, I said. Natasha Wimmer: "Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, is Mexico's foundational modern novel. Published in 1955, it tells the story of a man who travels back to Comala, the town where he was born, and finds that it is now a ghost town where life and death are so confused that in the end even the narrator comes to believe himself a ghost."